Everyday Creative Blog

How do you know that a particular unmotivating situation warrants leaving, or staying? When do you exercise patience and when do you put the pedal down and turn the steering wheel? Or are we always doing a bit of both at the same time? Do you know much about Hegelian philosophy? Me neither.

However, I spent some time this morning reading up on the Futurist movement that came out of Russia and Italy in the beginning of the 20th century.

Futurism was first announced on Feb. 20, 1909, in a manifesto published by the Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The manifesto railed against the past, especially stale political and artistic traditions; proclaimed a love of speed, teachnology, and violence; their mascots were cars, planes and industrial landscapes and cities. The mood of the movement is reminiscent of Ayn Rand's stuff, no surprise since she came from Russia. Stylistically, I think of hi-fi black & white sci fi movies, like Metropolis. From the Italian front, one of the prominent artists (painting and scultping) was Umberto Boccioni. Above work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space 1913. Post script: Umberto Boccioni died in Verona, after falling off a horse during a training exercise for World War I. He was 33 years old.

The Russian Futurists however, were even more nihilistic. For one they paid no attention to Marinetti's paternal reputation. They hated the combo of history and art, going so far as to call Russian Lit Kings Pushkin and Dostoevsky total losers who should have been "heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity." But soon, a whole new wave of amazing Silver Age poets came riding in: Anna A; Maria T; Mandelstam; Block; Gorky, Mayakovski; and a whole bunch more I'm forgetting.

So, back to the original question: You have a Situation, it's been going on for a bit of time, it's bumming you out, and you wonder: wait it out or make a move? The Futurists would say Go, because to Stay would be to get gobbled up by your past. But they were anarchists and (in some cases, shhh, Fascists).